The Evil Package-Deal
by Joseph Rowlands
One of the bigger challenges to promoting or understanding a radically new philosophy is that so many words and concepts are tied to the traditional worldview. When everyone is an altruist, terms like "moral" and "immoral" stop meaning a compatibility with a moral standard, and instead are viewed as meaning specifically whether you help others or not. When reason and emotion are viewed as being necessarily in opposition, "objectivity" means without emotional bias. When its believed that you have to choose between sacrificing yourself to others or sacrificing others to you, "selfishness" means the latter.
The term 'evil' is one I'd like to focus. It has all kinds of baggage and connotations because it's viewed traditionally from an altruistic perspective. When others are viewed as the standard of good, evil means the intentional hurting of other people. It's the strongest form of moral condemnation.
The issue is that this extremely potent moral term is fully integrated with the altruistic ethics. Can the term be used, as is, within a radical new ethics like Objectivism offers? There are problem with that, and this article is meant to explore some of these issues.
The Objectivist ethics is not others-oriented. Your standard of value is your own life. Moral judgment needs to go along with this standard. You're moral when you're pursuing your own life. You're immoral when you're hurting your own life. Moral judgments revolve around this question of whether it enhances your life or not.
Now if we were to take 'evil' to mean the most potent form of immorality, we'd see a huge difference with the conventional view of it. Normally we think of Hitler and Stalin as evil because they killed so many people. But we'd be judging them based on the damage they did to other people, and not the damage they did to their own lives.
If we judged them by the standard of their own self-interest, we would still conclude that they're immoral, but only because they're sacrificing their rational interests. Someone who practices self-sacrifice, like Mother Teresa, could easily be argued as more immoral. And so if 'evil' just means the most potent form of immorality, we'd have a huge discrepancy with the traditional view of the term. Mother Teresa would be more evil than Hitler.
I need to make the point that just because the conclusion is a little strange, it doesn't mean this line of reasoning is wrong. Forget about the fact that you normally have a very different understanding of evil. You have to remember that it's ultimately a moral judgment, and so must have a different meaning under a new morality. If we stuck with all of the traditional uses of moral terms, we'd also have to accept that it's "moral" to sacrifice for other people. Objectivist ethics turns traditional moral terms on their heads.
So the traditional view upholds 'evil' in an others-oriented way. The most potent form of immorality is completely defined by how it affects others. Since Objectivism rejects that others-based standard, it has to reject that conventional view of the term.
There is more to it, though. What about Hitler? Yes we can judge him based on whether he acted to promote his own life or not and to what extent. But there's also the morally significant fact that he killed so many people. That's secondary when viewed from the perspective of whether he acted in his own self-interest, but that's not the only way to judge him. We can also judge him by the standard of our own self-interest, instead of just his.
From the perspective of our own lives, it's more important that Hitler killed people than that he wasn't living his life to the fullest. We want to identify the fact that someone is a threat to our lives, a threat to the harmony of interests, and generally destructive. But it's not simply that a person is dangerous. Mudslides are dangerous. We want to identify a moral quality. We want to identify that the person has a choice, and that their choices are incompatible with our own lives.
The conventional view of evil encompasses this kind of judgment, and it's able to fully integrate it with the moral/immoral judgment because both are others-oriented. Our problem is that by the nature of our philosophy, these two halves are not the same. Combining them would be creating an unwarranted package-deal.
I don't have a clean solution to this. The term has two different meanings, both of which have emotional appeal. On the one hand, evil means extreme immorality. On the other hand, it means someone who's a threat to others. In Objectivism, one is measured by how it affects your own life, and the other is measured by how it affects others lives. Choosing would mean either suggesting Hitler was evil for hurting himself, or that good and evil are judgments about whether you help or hurt other people.
A package-deal like this is very difficult to overcome, both conceptually, and in the ability to communicate these moral concepts. The first step is in the identification of the package-deal.
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